Building the foundation for supercharged growth: Designing and activating NCC’s target culture
Impact in a nutshell
Established a clear cultural anchor, in the form of refreshed values and behaviours, to guide employees on the journey towards doubling NCC’s impact by 2030.
Activated cross-organisation working groups to design, de-centralise and lead the effective delivery of systemic, cultural and behavioural interventions for priority behavioural shifts.
Distributed decision-making and accountability across the organisation through the set up and support of a new leadership governance structure.
Context
The UK’s engineering and technology sector operates under immense pressure. Geopolitical shifts, volatile supply chains and the rapid adoption of Gen AI and digitalisation are fundamentally reshaping the industry’s landscape and demanding continuous innovation and resilience.
The most significant challenge is the talent gap: the sector is grappling with market-wide shortages and recruitment competition for the skilled expertise required to deliver on ambitious sustainability and innovation goals. Consequently, brand and people leaders are urgently seeking new ways to retain top talent and drive new ideas through a culture of ownership and psychological safety.
Challenge
NCC’s strategic ambitions were truly impressive: to become industry’s innovation partner and help create a sustainable, productive and resilient future. They had set out bold priorities to double their impact across technology, sectors and services over the next five years as part of their new strategy. An exciting mission but a daunting challenge of scale, speed and uncertainty all while remaining safe and reliable in daily operations.
The business was simultaneously undergoing a rebrand that demanded a “new sense of self” from colleagues and stakeholders alike. Internally, the employee experience was changing drastically: significant growth and hybrid working in recent years meant it was no longer the norm to know every face.
Alongside, NCC knew that this shift in size and expectations would put considerable pressure on people and the current organisational structure. If decision-making and accountability remained centralised at the executive level, NCC would be critically limited in its ability to move with the necessary speed and agility to meet its ambitious goals. To adapt, the organisation also needed to evolve its operating structures, including introducing a new Director Group, and needed a more purpose-driven, resilient and proactive culture to support these shifts.
Our core challenge was to define and embed a target culture that would enable their strategy. This required establishing a clear, reliable set of values and behaviours, supported by the right training, opportunities and motivation structures, to steer the organisation through this high-change environment.
Vision for impact
NCC’s vision was to create a cultural anchor for the organisation that would hold firm and provide guidance on the behaviours needed to thrive during rapid growth and change. They wanted to articulate and activate a target culture that would enable their new strategy, embody their new brand and be authentic and aspirational for NCC’s people. That meant this process needed to help people feel heard during a time of change and build excitement and motivation for the next chapter.
To become industry’s innovation partner, NCC knew that its target culture needed to be a psychologically safe culture where people are recognised for exploratory and bold behaviours; where there is effective collaboration and a strong sense of ownership; and where there is real pride in the impact of everybody’s work, both personally and collectively.
For NCC, this wasn’t about fixing something broken. It was about evolution – going from good to great to proactively mature the organisation with culture as a key strategic lever.
To get this right, it was vital for NCC to do this in a way that gained representative and inclusive input across all demographics (e.g. ensuring inclusion of workshop-based technician staff and remote workers), anticipated the future cultural challenges of expanding into the defence sector, and surfaced the positive ingredients of their culture today.
How did we do it?
Any effective change programme starts with listening. In our intelligence phase, we had over 350 touchpoints with NCC’s people across 1:1 interviews, focus groups and an org-wide survey. This rigour resulted in a clear diagnosis of the current employee experience, a deep understanding of the cultural shifts required to reach NCC’s target culture for accelerated yet safe growth, and led to a refresh of the organisation’s values and behaviours.
Instead of jumping straight to activation, we took time to upskill the NCC team, review current processes and ensure the organisation was ‘ready’ to roll out the new culture across all phases of the employee lifecycle. We worked with Directors to build greater alignment and ownership, crafting clear Terms of Reference and decision-making processes for the newly established Director Group. We also brought together an ambassadors network to hold the ‘voice of the people’ and formally distribute the responsibility for culture change across the organisation, building the bottom-up ownership required for scale.
We established four cross-organisation working groups comprised of Directors, Culture Ambassadors and HRBPs to co-create behavioural activation plans for four priority behaviours identified to achieve NCC’s Target Culture fastest. Each working group was taken through an upskilling and experimentation design programme grounded behavioural science theories and real-world case studies to build their capability, confidence and strategies for leading cultural change going forward.
Impact moments
Activating through the employee lifecycle
NCC’s new values and behaviours framework needed to be embedded systemically. We worked collaboratively with the HR team to map the entire Employee Lifecycle, identifying specific points – from onboarding to performance review – that either enabled or hindered employees from living the Target Culture.
This exercise culminated in two critical outputs: a visual heat map to represent and prioritise areas of strength and areas of opportunity, and a strategic 1-3 year roadmap outlining key actions and initiatives, packed with external insights of good practice for inspiration.
As a result, owners of each phase of the lifecycle were equipped to begin integrating the new culture directly into NCC’s core operational fabric for both immediate and long-term impact.
Pioneering holistic cultural measurement
Proving the long-term impact of the cultural shifts required an advanced measurement strategy. We developed a bespoke, innovative and holistic framework to measure the organisation’s overall cultural health, pushing the boundaries beyond simple survey scores.
The strategy was designed to triangulate and correlate engagement, behavioural, mindset and business metrics to be robust in its approach and enable tracking of both cultural experience and impact.
This framework also furthered collective engagement and accountability for NCC’s Target Culture as its design relied on data sources from all parts of NCC, not just the HR function.
100% of Directors felt they were able to honestly share their views on NCC’s organisational culture
93% of focus group participants believe that transitioning to a new ‘target culture’ will help NCC better deliver its new strategy
90% of Culture Ambassadors have role-modelled the kind of behaviours needed to deliver on NCC’s new strategy in the last two weeks
94% of participants owning the culture shifts felt this programme was a valuable opportunity to connect with other colleagues across NCC
Forward-looking summary
This programme has successfully set the foundation for NCC’s ambitious growth journey. Not only are employees and leaders embracing the new values and behaviours, but customers and stakeholders are also celebrating their uniqueness, authenticity and power. Looking ahead, this work is set to deliver significant value for NCC as it doubles its impact and pushes the boundaries of innovation for industry.
Client quotes
“By aligning and refreshing our strategy, our brand and our culture all at once, we now have a shared understanding of the direction we’re going in and the team is really pulling together.
Our values feel so simple, tangible and authentic – they’re written in “pub language” which everyone understands and they clearly link to the four outcomes we want to deliver as an organisation.
It’s early days but our values are already being used in really practical ways like performance conversations and in programme reviews, which I know in time will mean we will drive better results.
One of our clients and partners told us our values were the best they had ever seen! That external impact is just as important.”
CEO, NCC
“When we first set out on this journey, we hadn’t even intended to change our core values. However, the team’s thorough diagnostic approach clearly showed us that we needed to evolve to meet our new strategic goals. They brought the perfect balance of robust methodology and expertise to give us confidence, yet remained completely flexible and adaptable, ensuring the approach was perfectly tailored to meet who we are as an engineering organisation, where we were in our growth journey, and where we needed to go.”
Director of HR, NCC
“NCC’s commitment to intentional culture design as a genuine lever for their growth has been so powerful to be a part of. By activating change at every level – organisational, team, and individual – they haven’t just updated their values; they’ve set themselves up to supercharge their ability to innovate. We’re excited to see this resilient, purpose-driven culture continue to push the boundaries of what’s possible for the UK’s engineering sector.”
Associate Director, Kin&Co
Our work speaks volumes